When Good Systems Go Bad: The High Stakes of SAP CRM Performance

The SAP Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system is the customer interaction engine for many large enterprises. It promises a unified, 360-degree view of the customer, streamlining everything from sales and service to marketing.

In theory, SAP CRM is the key to unlocking operational efficiency and building lasting customer loyalty. However, when a mission-critical SAP CRM underperforms, the consequences can be severe, grinding user productivity to a halt and putting customer satisfaction and revenue at risk.

The Cracks Begin to Show

One of India’s largest natural gas distribution companies faced this challenge. After a significant investment in SAP CRM to enhance customer experience, the company found its system was buckling under the strain of customer traffic.

Users were plagued by unusual and multiple login sessions for the same person. This led to the system hitting its session limit and locking users out with a “503 server error.” Hardware bottlenecks were also hampering user requests, and critical back-office and billing processes needed re-engineering. The natural gas distributor knew it had a performance issue, but internal constraints prevented the use of a single, unified testing tool, so it needed a specialist.

A Two-Pronged Attack on Performance Issues

The company chose ImpactQA to help resolve this issue. On its part, ImpactQA devised a methodical, two-cycle testing approach, first in the QA environment and then in Production. The team developed a framework using a combination of two tools to conduct performance testing. They included:

Cycle 1: The QA Environment Deep-Dive

The first step was understanding the application’s behavior in a controlled QA environment. The team immediately suggested changes to the Workload Management (WLM) configuration. To get to the root cause of slow performance, ImpactQA used the EG Innovations monitoring tool for a granular, code-level analysis, pinpointing users experiencing high response times. To address session errors, the team suggested increasing the session limit and implementing restrictions on user logins.

Cycle 2: Optimizing the Live Production Environment

With insights from the QA phase, the team moved to the live production environment. User journey stats revealed clear hardware bottlenecks. In response, the team enhanced key servers’ RAM and CPU configurations by 20-50%.

The analysis also uncovered that long-running batch jobs (RFCs) ran during peak business hours, consuming critical resources. ImpactQA recommended a pipeline mechanism to handle these calls more efficiently. Finally, a timeout mechanism was implemented for back-end queries to prevent them from impacting the live system.

The Remarkable Results

The impact of this meticulous performance testing was transformative. The natural gas company’s system performance for request handling improved by 60% and automating complex billing processes reduced revenue leakage by 37%.

Beyond the technical fixes, the enhanced stability boosted cross-sell and up-sell capabilities, resulting in a 30% increase in customer retention.

What This Means for SAPinsiders

A healthy CRM is the foundation for a 360-degree customer view. Fixing the CRM’s core performance in the case above boosted customer retention. For SAPinsiders, this reinforces that creating a holistic view of the customer requires tight integration between front-end CX platforms and back-end ERP data. This connection is only possible when the core systems are stable and performant.

Performance tuning is a deep, technical discipline. ImpactQA’s approach went beyond surface-level fixes, addressing hardware bottlenecks by enhancing RAM and CPU by up to 50% and identifying inefficient batch jobs running at peak hours. It shows that data remains the lifeblood of modern AI and analytics projects; without the deep-dive performance tuning needed to ensure data quality and system availability, these more advanced initiatives cannot succeed.

On-premise stability is a prerequisite for modernization. According to SAPinsider research, the transition to SAP S/4HANA is a significant factor in the transformation of the business process. The case of the Indian natural gas company is a powerful example of this principle in action. By stabilizing its SAP CRM, the company solved immediate business problems and established the solid technical foundation necessary for any future migration or digital transformation project.